Latest market data

Stock search

“Fail fast” is an overly used and loaded adage. Entrepreneurs
don’t wake up and ask themselves “How can I fail today?” What’s
important is not to embrace failure, but to figure out how to
manage it.

As an educator at Launch
Academy, one of the hardest things I deal with are students
grappling with failure. Our program attracts and admits
overachievers, who, like entrepreneurs, are very hard on
themselves. What’s unexpected about our program and in
entrepreneurial endeavors, is that failure is expected. How we
face it is what defines us. Below, I share the recipe for failure
we convey to our students.

Try. Theodore Roosevelt, one of the toughest and
most interesting executives of our history, tells us that, “It is
hard to fail, but it is worse never to have tried to succeed."

Akhil Nigam, Founder of MassChallenge said during a panel during
National Small
Business Week that “As an early stage founder, you must will
your business into existence.” If you do not act for fear of
failure, how will you create anything of meaning?

Own your failure. While willing your creation or
your new skills into existence, you will stumble across the way,
and those that follow you will struggle as well. Take ownership
of your part in failure. If you make excuses for yourself or
blame others, no good can come of an already concerning
situation.

Forgive yourself. For many of us, this is the
hardest part. For me, personally, it helps to acknowledge that
failure is a part of the human experience, and that I can grow
from it. It also helps to have others to relate to. Dani Dewitt,
an alumna of the Launch Academy program, shares “I think being
around a group of people that were also fighting through the same
kinds of things at night helped me realize I just needed to keep
looking at things from different angles until I could solve the
problem.”

Apologize authentically. As part of owning your
failure, be authentic to those you may have wronged. There is
nothing more infuriating for your customers than the corporate
“we apologize for any inconvenience.” As an example, if your
email service went down, it would be better to hear, “We know
email is critical to your business, and we feel terrible for the
disruption. We’ll update you as soon as we resolve the issue to
get you back up and running.” Always acknowledge the problem and
stress you understand the importance of solving it.

Perform a transparent retrospective. In
corporate sillyspeak, one might call this a post mortem. This
term needs to go away. Unless you’re in the healthcare business,
it’s unlikely anyone died as a result of your failure. In
software development, we use the term retrospective when we refer
to a meeting where we look back at what went well and what went
wrong in the management of failure. Involve stakeholders in this
process, and be transparent in sharing what you’ve learned with
your employees and your customers.

Teach others. We have a saying at Launch
Academy, “to teach is to learn.” Take the insight you’ve gleaned
from your retrospective and share your tribulations. It will
benefit others in that they can learn from your experience, and
it will provide you with closure.

As entrepreneurs, our businesses move too quickly to dwell on
failure. Use this framework as a means to learn and move on,
having benefited from the experience. Let’s not be confused
anymore; failing isn’t fatal.